The Home Depot Team Notes of Interest

• The Home Depot Team and Joey Logano are on top of their game in the closing races of the 2010 NASCAR Sprint Cup Series season. They have an average finish of 6.6 during the past five races at a short track, superspeedway and two intermediate tracks, and have finished in the top 10 for four consecutive races. His last five finishes have been an 11th in Fontana, seventh in Charlotte, sixth at Martinsville, fifth at Talladega and a fourth last weekend in Texas.
• Logano and The Home Depot Team moved up to 16th in the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series driver point standings with their fourth-place finish last weekend, bypassing Juan Pablo Montoya in points. They are now just 12 points out of the top 15 behind Ryan Newman. With two races remaining, Logano has earned six top-five finishes this season, doubling the number of top-five finishes from his rookie campaign.
• The team returns to Phoenix International Raceway after earning a 10th-place finish there in April. The team qualified sixth, ran as high as second, and was running seventh before the final caution flag waved setting up a green-white-checker finish. Different tire strategies put Logano back to 12th for the final restart and he passed two cars in the closing laps to earn his first top-10 finish at the one-mile track.
• The No. 20 Home Depot Team is taking chassis #284 this weekend for the 378-lap race at PIR. The team raced this chassis just once this season to an 11th-place finish at Auto Club Speedway in Fontana just five weeks ago. The back-up chassis is once again #272 which has competed in three races in 2010: Chicagoland (18th) the Coca-Cola 600 at Charlotte Motor Speedway (16th) and in June at Michigan (10th).
• Welcome aboard The Home Depot associates from store #2829 in Mankato, Minn. The store number will be displayed on the rear quarter panel of The Home Depot Toyota this weekend in Phoenix. Mankato was originally called Mahkato, meaning greenish blue earth to Mankato’s first inhabitants, the Dakota Indians. An early spelling error was never corrected and Mahkato became Mankato.

Joey Logano quotes on Phoenix:

“We ran well there in the spring, we just got beat on pit strategy at the end. With the way we’ve been running, I think we can come away with a top five. We had a good enough car there in April to finish in the top five and we are a better race team than we were. This is the best we’ve been in the two years I’ve been driving The Home Depot Toyota. It’s cool and frustrating at the same time to think where we’d be if we had made The Chase.

“Running well at Texas last weekend was a huge confidence booster for me and this team. I haven’t been very good there in the past, so to run as well as we did felt awesome. At one point I asked Zippy (crew chief Greg Zipadelli) where we were running and he told me fourth. I almost didn’t believe him. But it was one of those weekends where we didn’t start off well, but found some things in the final practice that worked well in the race. At the start of the season if we had qualified 20th, it would have set the tone for the entire race weekend. Now it’s not that big of a deal because we know we can race our way to the front.”

Joey Logano Phoenix International Raceway Stats

Joey Logano 2010 NASCAR Sprint Cup Series Stats

Joey Logano Career NASCAR Sprint Cup Series Stats

Friday, November 12, 2010 Sessions

• Kobalt Tools 500 practice on ESPN2 at 2 pm
• Kobalt Tools 500 qualifying on ESPN2 at 5:30 pm

Saturday, November 13, 2010 Sessions

• Kobalt Tools 500 practice on SPEED at 1:30 pm
• Kobalt Tools 500 final practice on ESPN2 at 3 pm

Sunday, November 14, 2010 Session

• Kobalt Tools 500 on ESPN at 3 pm